Traveling with twins in Minnesota: Jeffers Petroglyphs

Memorial Day is always a good day, in my mind, to look back in history. Living a good ways from family this Memorial Day (my beloved and our baby went to California to visit her aunt for the week), meant that dad and the 2 older daughters marked the day together. The community picnic (with hot-dogs and pork burgers, chips, beans, and bars, and the subsequent trip to the county historical museum just up the street were my most celebrated ideas of the day.

After the trip to the museum and a quiet break at home, I, Dad had the bright idea of heading North West into the prairie and taking a good look around one of the true historic wonders of Minnesota. (click on the pictures to enlarge them and then start searching for the carvings).

The petroglyphs neat Jeffers are prehistoric (at least pre-European history) carvings on an outcropping of exposed red Sioux Quartzite. I first came to the spot about 11 years ago. The state historical society has made some real progress over the years. Durring my first trip signs were out and trails were marked on the rock and nearby to protect the images from people. A building was underconstruction, but not yet complete back then.

I came back a few years ago with another history buff. But this trip with our oldest girls reminded me of the wonder of this place, that like they said is, just "Out here in the middle of the wind and the prairie?" No body knows which group of people carved the images in the rock or what they mean. The symbols are easy to make out: spears, people, animals like the turtle and the buffalo. But the bigger question of meaning their remains unresolved by modern historians. The mystery of why this rock has been a place for stories over the centuries is fascinating and easily leads to great imagination about who, when, where, why, and how these images in the rock came to be.

The weather was warm and my traveling companions did their best in the late afternoon early evening memorial day sun.. Thank goodness for big enough water bottles and interpretive signs through out the area.

One story that the girls are still discussing is the legend that the rock formartion was a safe place during a great flood. The legend said that the rock turned red from the blood of those who died in the flood.

Whatever the cause of the rock or the origin of the images in the rock our girls had an unsolved mystery to talk about and a beaded bracelet and necklace to show at school during sharing time.